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Adonis Images

Description

for soprano and piano With specially written poems by Kãrlis Verdinš based on the Adonis chapters from Frazer's The Golden Bough, each song in this little cycle explores a single Affekt. The first is doleful and laden, the second aerated and evanescent, the third is static and expansive, with a hint of a march for the troops, while the fourth is spare and rather withdrawn. The fifth song is very brief and slightly enigmatic, leading to a final movement that tries to capture something of the poem's lush, but ultimately redemptive, grief.

Programme Notes:

Adonis Images was originally called Aldington Images, and was a setting of a sequence of short poems by the English Imagist Richard Aldington. Earlier this year Karlis VerdinÅ¡, from Latvia, wrote six new poems (in English) to the existing music in a process akin to the 16th/17th century practice of contrafactum. (Contrafactum was the appending of vernacular words to Latin originals, or vice versa, turning madrigals into motets, or Marian antiphons into Anglican anthemsâ) Based on the Adonis chapters from Frazer's The Golden Bough, VerdinÅ¡' poems have a sad, hieratic quality reminiscent of Imagism (the subject, incidentally, of his Masters thesis) at the same time displaying his own unique sensibility.

Because of the brevity of the movements, and the intense focus on a single idea in each poem, each song in this little cycle explores a single Affekt. The first is doleful and laden, the second aerated and evanescent; the third is static and expansive, with a hint of a march for the troops, while the fourth is spare and rather withdrawn. The fifth song is very brief and slightly enigmatic, leading to a final movement that tries to capture something of the poem's lush, but ultimately redemptive, grief.Copyright Gabriel Jackson

Adonis Images

Composer Information

Gabriel Jackson (b.1962)

One of Britain's foremost composers, after three years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, Gabriel Jackson went on to study composition with Richard Blackford and John Lambert at the Royal College of Music. Particularly acclaimed for his choral works, his liturgical pieces are in the repertoires of most of Britain's cathedral and collegiate choirs and he is a frequent collaborator with the leading professional groups of the world. From 2010-2013 he was Associate Composer to the BBC Singers. In 2014 his hour-long The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, commissioned for the 750th anniversary of Merton College, Oxford, was premiered in its chapel. May 2015 saw the premiere at the Latvian National Opera of Spring Rounds for soprano, choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Riga-based youth choir Kamer for their 25th anniversary. He was recently commissioned by The Marian Consort to write Stabat Mater to mark their 10th anniversary.